THE MAYOR'S FISCAL PLAN: THE BREAKDOWN

By GREG RETSINAS

Published: April 17, 2003

The $44.5 billion best-case budget proposal that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled on Tuesday calls for thousands of layoffs and cuts in services. This is a look at how it would affect various areas.

Sanitation

Fewer Picking Up

Trash would be collected less frequently under the mayor's proposed budget, and there would be far fewer people doing the collecting.

In Queens and Staten Island, neighborhood garbage pickup would be reduced to once a week from twice, and neighborhoods in Brooklyn that get their trash picked up three times a week would be reduced to two times weekly.

Also, recycling, now collected on a weekly basis, would be reduced to every other week in most of the city, except for certain parts of Manhattan.

Department of Sanitation officials said these and other measures would save about $44 million. The changes would start in the next few months.

More sanitation-related cuts included in the $600 million of savings identified by the mayor's office on Tuesday include laying off 202 uniformed sanitation workers, and eliminating 75 other positions through attrition.

The bulk of those layoffs would come from cutting most of the city's specialized cleaning units. These are the one- and two-man crews that supplement truck crews. These workers ride on the small, motorized litter patrols or sit on the backs of trucks and use brooms to help sweep up garbage spills and use at parades and festivals.

The city is also trying to save money by stopping maintenance of the vacuum-disposal system that operates underneath the buildings of Roosevelt Island. City workers would still collect the trash produced by the system but would no longer maintain it.

Other savings would come from replacing many uniformed administrative workers with lower-paid, entry-level civilian employees and closing the city's four self-help centers in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens -- where residents can dump their own trash that is too large for curbside collection. GREG RETSINAS